Friday, October 22, 2004

The Lt. Governer of Illinois steps in to back the Fiber for Our Future Initiative. It's great stuff and applies to our situation as well as to the mess in Illinois. I'll let him speak, he does a good job:

Saying he wanted to ensure a "fair fight," Illinois Lt. Gov. PatQuinn came to Geneva Thursday to announce his support for the citizens group Fiber For Our Future and the Tri-Cities broadband referendum on the ballots in Batavia, Geneva and St. Charles on Nov. 2.

Quinn warned voters about expensive direct mail and other advertisements by SBC telling them not to vote for the referendums. Those ads, he said, are paid for with their customer's dollars and don't tell the whole story.

He compared Fiber For Our Future's battle against SBC to the biblical story of David and Goliath.

"The citizens are going against these big Goliaths with all the money, and the Goliaths are going to tell us their way," he said. "Remember who won? We believe in competition in America. If big companies can define the 21st century and say it's only their way, we could end up really getting socked as consumers."

"Instead, trust local officials, trust people who are from the community, trust people who really want to have the kind of wide open competition that our country believes in," he said.

[Quinn] held up a photocopy of one of the direct-mail pieces from SBC and said the companies were going to spend a lot of money to squash the referendum.

The direct-mail piece suggests the referendum question puts taxpayer money at risk, even though in St. Charles and Batavia, the question prohibits the use of tax-backed financing, and in Geneva, the ordinance backing the question does.

"The people who ought to decide the future are the people who live in the community," Quinn said.

Its always nice when state-level politicians get it. (Lafayette has benefited immensely from the quiet support of Governer Blanco.) This should help the citzen's initiative which has been massively outspent on the publicity front by the phone and cable companies.